Bonus Track

19 Responses

Thank you for this story. The most powerful part for me–besides hearing the 4th graders speaking in the divorce class–was the bit about, in a marriage, it’s the adults’ job to make sense of the two different worlds that come together to make a whole family; in a divorce, it remains for the children to perform that synthesis.
My parents divorced about 25 years ago. I was in the 4th grade. As an adult, I often have the eerie feeling that I am a family relic. Though my original family is extinct, I am still a product of it; does that make me obsolete? Older than my own parents somehow?
As you can probably tell, I’m still trying to make sense of my family.
It felt good to hear the kids in your story having a public place to talk about divorce. They need all the support they can get, and if they are afraid divorce is not a suitable topic for polite company, they are less likely to work through their feelings.

I loved this piece. It is wonderful to hear the stories of kids who are not considered to be screwed up by divorce. My parents divorced when I was 3, had joint custody and both remarried when I was around 8. It wasn’t easy and of course I bear the scars, mostly from the joint custody agreement that had me bouncing from house to house each week. The way divorce is handled is what shapes children the most, not simply the fact that their parents aren’t together. I can’t remember my parents together and that doesn’t bother me. What did bother me was feeling that I didn’t have a secure place in either household and had no stability.

Having just had a baby I am now facing divorce myself. Although it is hugely disappointing personally, I do feel that I am equipped to help my son through this process. I also keep reminding myself that both Bill Clinton and Burak Obama were raised by single mothers and in my opinion are good people doing great things.

Such an excellent program! I, too, listened twice. I feel there are so many marriages which could be rescued if people only saw the importance of the family unit. Many marriages would not go on the rocks if the main objective of both parents was to keep the family together rather than selfish gratification (i.e., infidelity, financial indiscretion, being ‘bored,’ etc.) I know some divorces are blessings to kids in danger, but as a teacher I see so many kids put in danger as they seek comfort from groups less valuable than a family. I now teach college and it still surprises me how many 20-somethings talk about their parents’ divorce as a turning point. I hope your report gives kids comfort and parents determination to make the family work. Thanks for sharing.

Thank you for your candor and insights as a teacher of our children.
And your fundamental reminder of our joint responsibilities to resolve conflict where we can, for those we care about most.
I think this is unfortunately not a way of thinking that is well understood or supported in our culture.
There is much presumption and support for ending a marriage.
-an entire industry of lawyers and therapists…
Also, the confirmation bias played out by friends and others that offer “sympathy” for the individual instaed of non-judgemental compassion for the family as a whole social organism.

You’ve done a good telling the stories of the children of divorce. Next I hope you will assemble the compelling stories of the children of intact, but broken, marriages. It takes courage to cause change. Painting divorcing parents as runaways from responsibility to their families is judgmental and not particularly insightful. The job of parenting is love, and that can be accomplished in many “family” configurations. It can also be absolutely absent in intact marriages.

Bravo! There is a painful irony in our society that as damaging as divorce can be, the divorce process itself is no sort of relationship health indicator. Some divorces are healthy, functional and the right progression for families. Conversely, a marriage can be in disrepair of the worst order and divorce is never part of the picture. And then there are children where marriage isn’t part of the equation and all of the above still applies. It’s about love rather than hate, forgiveness rather than blame, kindness instead of anger, etc.

I just heard ARW’s piece on children of divorce for the second time and liked it as much the second time as the first. As a parent who divorced who is not from a divorced family, I was very aware that there was no reference to the kids who are messed up from parents that should have divorced. I agree with JBillie that that group would be a better control group to compare how divorced kids are doing. I’m 48 and know a some of these, whose parents’ marriage was so screwed up that the kids never married and are challenged to maintain a healthy relationship (Not that marrying must be the goal.)
I know I was severely depressed due to the unhappiness in my marriage and would not have left it due to what I was taught. Thankfully, my husband did leave, and thus began our mutual recovery, but I witnessed my daughter go through some of the steps you outlined, especially unconsciously blaming herself (she was 2.5 years old), “adaptable” etc. We paid for counseling for her and to help all of us managing two different households beginning when she was 12, and that was helpful for her and for me.
Luckily, my exhusband, when he saw that we were heading for divorce (while I was in denial) got a hold of a book called “The Good Divorce: how to keep your family together when your marriage falls apart” which gave ample evidence about what happens to children in ideal, not ideal, bad and horrible divorces over 10 years in some midwestern state, Wisconsin? following 100 families. Very helpful for both of us in avoiding common unconscious potholes and pitfalls.
I know it wasn’t easy for my daughter, but I definitely think the deterioration of my mental health in the marriage would have been much worse, or certainly given her a much less common scar than the emotional scar tissue of divorced parents. Even at 2 years old she was saying “I wish I wasn’t born” or “I wish I was nothing” when she got angry which was exactly what I was feeling most of the time even though I wasn’t verbalizing it. Something needed to change. I feel like divorce saved my life and definitely allowed her to grow up with a mentally healthier and more stable mom.
Thank you again for such a thoughtful, well researched, interesting piece.

Interesting to see the conservative viewpoint represented on NPR, LOL! Not the first place I’d look for it!!

Of course honesty is a good thing, rather than having to toe the party line and sweep the consequences of divorce under the rug so that certain people can feel more comfortable at the expense of others, and I applaud that sentiment.

But intellectual honesty is also important, and I’m glad that Laura, JBillie, et al have pointed out the sleight of hand that went on in this piece. Of course, maybe that’s bound to happen when you go to only one source for your talking heads in a piece like this – both experts whose opinions were included are from the conservative Institute for American Values, which promotes narrow views of family, parenting, and gender roles based on the Christian tradition.

Like Laura, my mental health deteriorated dangerously while I was with my daughter’s father, who suffered from addiction as well as other issues and was ambivalent at best about our relationship. I fall on the more precarious side of the mental health continuum anyway (whether because of genetic inheritance or due to early life trauma, who can say) so ultimately it came down to: was my daughter better off with one parent who could more or less hold it together alone, or two parents who were completely dysfunctional? And I’m not sure what Ms. Marquardt is trying to say with her self-contradictory statement in support(?) of “loveless marriages” but when I imagine my daughter being treated the way I was in my marriage, I would sooner see the Earth crash into the sun than have her normalize my experience and grow up to emulate it.

I tried for 5 agonizing years to make our partnership work and although loyalty is a core personality trait of mine, as well as a value I hold dearly, I think I showed her the best example I could by divorcing her father while doing my best with the help of Al-Anon and therapy to support her in developing the healthiest relationship possible with him. Now she has a stable place to live, a mother who has more time and energy for her than before, and peace in our home. And she sees that even when people with problems make mistakes, we don’t have to demonize them and we can enjoy the good things we get from having them in our life, but with limits that protect our safety and our dignity. To me, this IS loyalty and this IS love and this IS sacrifice. But it is also having love and respect for yourself and not staying trapped in a situation that traumatizes and degrades you. For myself, emotionally, I cannot conceive of ever being involved in a romantic relationship ever ever again under any circumstances, and why anyone would choose to remarry for that purpose is a mystery to me. But intellectually I know that we aren’t all the same, and what makes sense to me in parenting my daughter is to be open about what mental health and illness, addiction, and relationship trauma are; how common they are and how we will all have to deal with these issues in some way in ourselves, our families, our friends, neighbors, coworkers etc. – and how we do have the tools to hold ourselves and others accountable for what we do with all the baggage we inherit.

Finally, I have to say that I think there is a larger issue here than marriage and divorce. The issue is healthy or unhealthy people and heathy or unhealthy relationships – intimate relationships and parenting relationships. If you look at it from a certain angle, you could say that marriage and divorce are just pieces of paper – the commitment or lack thereof are in your heart and mind, whether your union or relation is officially recognized or not. In places and times when people can’t get divorced, they can still leave each other, stay together in name but abuse and cheat on each other, or have marriage be based on financial or political alliances rather than an intimate relationship. In places and times when people can’t get married, they still form commitments and families (eg, enslaved people in the pre-civil war US, same-sex couples throughout time). Go figure! In any case, children imitate what they see, and there’s a lot we could all do to create a better world for them to grow up in.

Thanks for your story- you hit a lot of tender spots. I remember being the dirty kid of divorce dragged to see Kramer Vs. Kramer when I was 10 and being prodded for a reaction by the church families who brought me. I did not know how to communicate that the movie was no more about my family than theirs. As an adult the movies I cry through are Ice Storm and Together for their depiction of the abandonment and isolation I still live through. Friends whose families stayed together saw a different movie in those.
My parents divorced when I was 7 and I remember fake crying at the news to match my brother and sister’s real tears. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand that my parents would not live together anymore, I just didn’t feel sad about it.
Two years later, with a whole gang of friends with divorced parents, I would find myself alone on a park bench crying, unable to tell a classmate who asked that I cried for no reason that I knew. Now in my forties I think I finally can start to see how my family breaking up has caused me such deep hurt that I’ve lived my whole life since with a core of pure aching sadness that has yet to dull. As civil as my parent’s break-up was, it was never clear to me until recently how far from the wreckage of our family my parents fled with no intention of returning as my pillar of pain still waits for us to all come back together.

I woke up to this piece on Chicago Public Radio this past Sunday morning. I caught it again that same evening, driving home from the theater where I work in the bitter Chicago cold.

My parents divorced in 1996 when I was as 13 years old, only 9 months younger than their marriage. My sister was eight. We are now 26 and 21, respectively. We are polar opposite individuals and don’t talk about too terribly much in general, much less the divorce. If there was one thing at all that the experience drove into me, I think it might have been an irreversible feeling of persistent loneliness that rarely if ever surfaces as a public trait of my personality. At every familial turn, conversation, or interaction I am always left to wonder “how might this have happened if my parents were still married?” I wonder that into the future, as my sister and I struggle through the chaotic whirlwind of holidays that neither of my parents will ever have to juggle as we do. I wonder how this will be when and if I am every married with my own children, with a husband who may likely come from a divorced home himself. I wouldn’t say that I feel wronged, I just sometimes feel like I missed out on experiences that I can’t even begin to imagine. While I am grateful to have not lost either of my parents or my stepmother, it is as my mother described it to me during the divorce thirteen years ago: “divorce is the death of a family.”

When it happened, I didn’t tell anyone. I hid it from my friends until I couldn’t anymore. A divorced kid was a pitiful kid and I couldn’t bear being one. I feared the statistics that were mentioned in this program. Failure, rejection, a life of rehab, jail, and bad boyfriends that could all be traced back to the collapse of my immediate family. None of these things happened. I moved away, I graduated college, and I am now a writer and performance artist. Still, the threat of these hypothetical statistics haunt me. I am hard on myself and push my limits. I am a self-deprecating over-achiever, the root of my artistic voice that I have always managed to veil with a quirky sense of humor that I inherited from both of my parents.

While I have many years recovered from the initial blow of the experience, not a day has gone by that I haven’t thought about my parents divorce, and I don’t think I’ve cried about it for a long time until now (don’t worry. it was very little). I know that, emotionally speaking, I changed significantly at the moment my parents told us they were getting a divorce and I have never been able to get back to the moment before. I will always miss my family.

Thank you! I am both a child of divorce and a parent who is (very reluctantly) divorcing. I agree that the day my parents told me of their divorce was the end of my happy, secure childhood. Like many children of divorce, I lost contact mostly with one parent. To a child this is like a death. I truly believe in many cases divorce is a cop out for parents who would rather cut and run than deal with the hard issues of a marriage. The grass isn’t greener for divorcees, as you showed with divorce rates for second and third marriages!Relationships of all kinds are challenging. I had truly hoped that my own child could learn from me and my ex-spouse how to nurture and grow with another person for a lifetime. Its sad to me that our culture is so quick to say “it will be better for the kids in the end”. It is obvious to me and evidenced by those you interviewed that the pain and impact rarely ends when the papers are signed. That is only the beginning of the devastastation and loss for a child.

I feel exactly the same way. Divorce for the children is a pain that lasts forever. I am 41, parents divorced when I was only 5 or 6, I don’t even know, I just remember that was the worst news I could have ever imagined, did not see my dad much after that day, and still when I do get a chance to see him, I realize that I am still not important to him. Nobody in his family, mom, or sister, especially understand why I don’t want to come visit them, which is many many miles away. Maybe it’s because I don’t like the disappointment and sadness that goes with it. Luckily, I have my own family now, and my children, especially, make me happier than anything ever has, and my husband has his issues, too, but at least we are together, and for now, my children are very happy. I thank God for them every day. My mother, by the way, also makes it clear that the children she had with my stepfather are more important to her than I am. So, basically, I know that both parents moved on, and left me, when they divorced. They occasionally tell me they care, but I just have to accept that I am from the past; It’s just matter of fact; Get over, kid. In addition, when I was still in school, my mom took me out of the school I had always gone to since kindergarden, which was in the South, and moved me to the Northeast, where my stepdad’s family was. For a while, my stepdad’s family welcomed me, but once I started dating, they basically dis-owned me, too, so I really felt alone. I then got a job, put myself through college, moved in with my boyfriend, got married, bought a house, lost some twins before they were born, had 2 beautiful children, and then got real depressed when my boss got mean, but now have a much better boss, thank god, and things are finally going well, for the most part. My husband, at times, is difficult to deal with, but he definitely wants us to be together, so I do not get so depressed, but at times, I am still sad. I love my mom, but it’s the occasional comments that show her other children are more important that I am to her that hurt, and are a constant source of pain for me that is more than I should have to deal with at this age. I would almost rather move away from her, too, but my husband does not want to move, and neither do my children. I am now to the point where I will not call my mom and ask her to do anything with us, because it is too painful when she tells me she would rather be with my brother or sister.

Thank you for telling this story. Having listened for the second time, I feel like I should revisit it about every 6 months or so. The different perspective gives me strength to make the sacrifices to keep our marriage working for the benefit of the kids. Having children is a responsibility that must be taken seriously. I know we’re better parents together than we would be separated.

I think your next project should be: How did the kids turn out in the families that did not get a divorce but, instead, stuck together in a horrible relationship with, for instance: alcoholism, physical and/or sexual abuse, seeing parents cheating on eachother and having screaming fights.

Your control arrangement is not the happy families with no significant husband-wife conflict. Your control is: The families that had every reason to divorce but did not.

Thank you for this documentary. I was one of the children of divorce (age 12, 1980) whose life in many ways improved – more friends, better in school after the parents split. But I also know that my parents never seemed to be able to responsibility for what their decision to divorce did to their daughters. I tell friends who are divorcing never to forget that you will always be a family – that ex-spouse does not disappear. It’s up to you the parents – not the kids – to decide what kind of family yours will become.

Thank you for doing this program. I have always felt, as a child of divorce that even though this was the formative event of my life (age 10, 1973) and many others who grew up during that time, there just hasnt been much said or looked into about how it effected (and still effects) our lives. I wish I was in that book group.

The voices of the kids in the mandated classes was telling. And the leader of that class really understood the issues. It is really a shame that these types of classes are lost due to budget cuts when there is such a need. I wish I had that type of class when my parents divorced.

The best thing my parents did was get a divorce no more fighting yelling.and screaming I just wish my dad would five my mom more money so she doesn’t struggle so much and have to work like a dog! He makes way more than she does